Pages

1 June 2017

Lingering in the Proustian Moment ...

Well, I've finally made it to the
top of literature's Mount Everest ... That's twenty years of my life which I'll
never get back!

But - it was definitely worth it.
The view from up here is amazing, and I have a feeling every other book I read
from here on after will be slightly different because of my having made it all
the way through this one. It's hugely pleasurable, hugely entertaining,
mind-numbingly tedious and immensely boring in places. It's both frustrating
and exhilarating. It, shocks, it surprises, it cloys, it flows, it gushes, it's
tart and acerbic, it's sweet and mellifluous - it's all things, and it's
nothing. A wonder, and a waste of time. Marcel's a ninny and a prig; he's a
genius, he's witty and wise - he's all these things and more, just like this
book - this book is everything, it's life; it's memory and experience, it's
thoughts in and out of time. It's excellent, it's clever, and, despite initial
appearances, it's surprisingly well crafted, and odd to say at the end, but it
even feels - concise ... if that can
possibly make sense of such a phenomenally long and long-winded book?

Henry James summed up the
experience of reading Proust as one of “inconceivable
boredom associated with the most extreme ecstasy which it is possible to imagine.”
And it’s true, reading Proust is exquisite boredom. Andre Gide was the reader
who famously turned down Proust’s great book when it was first offered to the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1912, hence
Proust resorted to having Swann's Way
published privately. Gide later noted his error. Proust was then published by
Gallimard; and in 1919 Proust won the Prix Goncourt. The rest, as they say, is
history.

… Life is a piece of cake, if you
take the time to think long and hard enough about it.

For me, reading Proust was oddly
like meditating. I’d read ten or twenty pages in a sitting. Sometimes it was
hard to get into, but after persevering for a few agonisingly aeon-like moments,
one soon found that the flow of words would suddenly, inexplicably and
effortlessly carry you off on the current. Submitting to the gentle meander,
either drifting along, or letting one’s head spin in the pedantically fussy
eddies of his particularities, reading Proust is akin to turning one’s brain
off – or rather slipping it into neutral and letting your consciousness coast
along. At times I did wonder if reading Proust is in fact unhealthy; as, when
reading Proust, one can’t help but automatically suspend one’s critical acuity.
It’s an impossible book to ‘close read’ as the many themes he ambles through
and around continually send your mind off on its own self-absorbed tangents.
You can’t help reflecting on your own life and times, prompted by Proust’s
gentle ruminations, and it takes several pages before you suddenly awaken and
realise you’ve been reading without
reading. It’s an infuriating habit. Reading Proust cultivated it, and I’m
sure it had a negative effect upon my other reading – certainly, when during my
studies, I frequently found my mind wandering and unable to concentrate on
whatever academic article or book I was meant to be reading, suddenly having to
stop and retrace what was nothing more than a meaningless blur of words
stretching back over an endless sheaf of pages, I found myself mentally shaking
my fist and blaming Monsieur Proust for turning my mind into a lackadaisical
blob.

E. M. Forster is right to poke fun
at Proust’s famously long sentences:

“A
sentence begins quite simply, then it undulates and expands, parentheses
intervene like quick-set hedges, the flowers of comparison bloom, and three
fields off, like a wounded partridge, crouches the principal verb, making one
wonder as one picks it up, poor little thing, whether after all it was worth
such a tramp, so many guns, such expensive dogs, and what, after all, is its
relation to the main subject, potted so gaily half a page back, and proving to
have been in the accusative case.”

But they do serve a higher purpose.
The book is all about transcendental experience. There is no real plot, so to speak.
The book is an encapsulation of that internal reverie which we all manage to
execute in the lightening quick instant it takes to think and feel everything
within. Like a momentary flash of self-reflection before we fall into sleep at
the end of a long day. Like a dream in which all of our memories coincide and
happen simultaneously, sparking new thoughts, reflections and revelations only
half of which we will ever fully recall or examine in close detail. And that is why
we are all Proust. His colossal monument, as he likens it himself, is to help
us comprehend the cathedral of the mind in all its intricate enormity:

“How
happy would he be, I thought, the man who had the power to write such a book!
What a task awaited him! To give some idea of this task one would have to
borrow comparisons from the loftiest and the most varied arts; for this writer
– who, moreover, to indicate the mass, the solidity of each one of his
characters must find means to display that character’s most opposite facets –
would have to prepare his book with meticulous care, perpetually regrouping his
forces like a general conducting an offensive, and he would have also to endure
his book like a form of fatigue, to accept it like a discipline, build it up
like a church, follow it like a medical regime, vanquish it like an obstacle,
win it like a friendship, cosset it like a little child, create it like a new
world without neglecting those mysteries whose explanation is to be found
probably only in worlds other than our own and the presentiment of which is the
thing that moves us most deeply in life and in art. In long books of this kind
there are parts which there has been time only to sketch, parts which, because
of the very amplitude of the architect’s plan, will no doubt never be
completed. How many great cathedrals remain unfinished!”

Proust’s great work is a cathedral.
It is whole, intricate, vast, open, overwhelming; a maze and a labyrinth in
which to lose oneself – and although it is unfinished (the last volume has its
technical flaws aplenty, which had he lived longer he’d no doubt have polished and
smoothed into proper shape), it is surprisingly complete. I feared there
wouldn’t be, but happily there is a sense of an ending. When you get to the
final word, as with the harmonic variations in a great symphony, you realise Proust has actually managed to bring you full circle. It
really is a book unlike any other.

It took me twenty years in all to
read it, with two lengthy sabbaticals between volumes, which, I think means I
near enough read it in real time. Starting aged twenty and ending aged forty,
I've spent exactly half my life with this book happening in the background. I'd
always assumed that once I'd finished reading it that that would be it - never
again! It was such a long hard slog in some parts, yet in others I flew through
it, caught upon the wave. The actual reading of each volume was relatively
short, between two and four years, depending on various outside factors. But
now I've finished (much to my deep surprise) I can sense I may well one day
find myself drawn back in again ... But not just yet, I'm going to savour that
final sweet taste of the madeleine, and continue to enjoy the view a little
longer from up here, on the top of the highest mountain ...

2 comments:

Excellent piece on the thrills and frustrations of reading Proust and agree with everything you say although currently reading Dickens and prefer him. Still got the last Proust book to read and then I too will have reached this literary Everest. Have you read How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton? It's a nice companion piece.

Thanks, Alex. Hope you enjoy the last leg of the climb. Let me know what you make of it, and how that sense of completion affects your sense of the whole, as I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. Spent the last couple of months buried deep in PhD-related reading and writing so planning to escape for a bit with something more "out there", like Philip K. Dick. I've not read De Botton on Proust, but will take a look as maybe now-ish would be a good time to do so! Cheers.